Professional Qualifications Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 25th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, who makes important points about delegated legislation. No doubt we will return to them.

I declare my interest as an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. I assure noble Lords that this does not qualify me in any way to practise architecture—quite the reverse—but I mention it because Clause 11 of the Bill is devoted to the architectural profession. Although RIBA is not a professional regulator—noble Lords will note from the text of the Bill that this role is reserved by statute to the Architects Registration Board—none the less the clause may affect its members. In that respect, it is a matter of regret that the consultation that the Government have been undertaking on changes to the Architects Act has not been published in time for consideration in this debate. I understand that it is expected imminently. It is a pity that it is not available today, but I hope my noble friend the Minister can give some assurance that this response will be available before Committee. It is necessary, and would at least be extremely helpful in addressing Clause 11 if we could understand the context of policy in which the Government see this whole question, going forward.

I broadly welcome the Bill. In many ways I share the enthusiasm of my noble friend Lady Noakes for the scrapping of EU legislation but, like many other noble Lords, I am somewhat confused by the Bill. In some ways, this is not helped by the order in which its clauses are written. There is a degree of randomness about them. The start of the Bill is really Clause 4; that is the heart of the whole thing, and it is a permissive clause which allows the professional bodies in the scope of the Bill to enter into agreements with corresponding organisations in other countries. There cannot really be an objection to that. The only question, as hinted at by certain noble Lords, is why in a free society such permission from the Government is necessary. None the less, it cannot be objected to.

However, having addressed Clause 4, we must turn back to Clause 1, which makes a very important point. In effect, it says that there may be cases where the public interest requires the Government to intervene to ensure that those professional regulators are undertaking, or at least creating, a route by which those mutual recognitions can be put in place. The assumption is that there is a recalcitrance or a failure on the part of the professional organisations to carry out what they are permitted to do by Clause 4, and I do not object to that as such. Of course, in many cases, there may be reasons of public interest why the Government might want to act to make something happen, but it is not a very strong clause. Out of respect for the professional bodies or professional regulators, all that the clause does is require them to put in place a route whereby such applications can be processed. There is nothing in the clause mandating them to approve anybody or to ensure that something is coming through the envisaged pipeline. Therefore, it is rather weak as a measure for addressing what would have been an identified public interest.

A public interest is a very broad thing. One can imagine a public interest that covers a whole range of matters in which the Government could quite properly want to take an interest to ensure that action by the professional bodies would occur. But then we turn to Clause 2, which does something else. It says that there is only one public interest that the Government will contemplate that will allow and authorise them to take steps under Clause 1, which is a lack of supply, if noble Lords see what I mean, to meet something called demand in the domestic workforce. We are now going to say that, having taken this reasonable power—not a very strong power, but a reasonable one—to act in the public interest, the Government will limit themselves to using it only where there is a demonstrated demand.

This is the part of the Bill that causes me the most concern. Here I am repeating to some extent things that other noble Lords have said or hinted at. The first is that it seems to limit the sense of public interest unnecessarily tightly. I have made that point. The second is, as some noble Lords have indicated, that it will lead to endless debate about footling questions that are in many cases bound to end up the subject of judicial review: what is the right number of tax accountants for Wales? What is the appropriate number of lawyers or advocates in Scotland? There is no right answer to these questions, but this is the substance of a debate that the Government are inviting upon themselves every time they seek to exercise the powers. I say the Government—here, of course, I mean the national authorities, because it will not necessarily be this Government who exercise the power. Every time the national authority seeks to exercise this power, it will walk straight into this quagmire. I simply do not see any reason for it.

The third thing is that it links the Bill to immigration. A great deal of the debate we have had this afternoon has been not really about the recognition of professional qualifications but about the right to work in the United Kingdom. The Bill, although it stretches into the world of immigration, has no immigration effects. Simply having this qualification, even if there is a demand for it, does not necessarily give you the right to work here; no work permit flows from this. One is treading into the world of immigration policy without actually having an effect on it. That complicates the Bill very unnecessarily.

As background to my remarks—this will not necessarily be welcome to the many professionally qualified people who have spoken in the debate; I hasten to add, in case there was any doubt, that I have no professional qualifications at all, so I am not among them in any sense—although I do not share the caustic view of the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, of the professional bodies in his own sphere of activity, I come with a certain sort of scepticism and suspicion that professions often seek to limit entry into their profession with a view to generating a scarcity premium. Criticise me if you like, but I have to say that many regulators end up being captured by the professions they seek to regulate.

My worry about connecting this to immigration is that it puts the debate in the wrong place and gives to the regulators the notion that they are there as an arm of the immigration system, whereas we want them to carry out as objectively as possible the accreditation of foreign qualifications to the standard that the Bill requires—although that standard might change in the course of further stages. That process ought to have no consequence or connection to immigration at all. All that made me think that the Bill might be better without Clause 2 at all.

All that can be tested later and I hope I have laid out what I see to be the main issues. I must end by saying how grateful I am to my noble friend the Minister for the time he gave me to discuss these issues and explain them to me. While I feel that I understand the Bill better as a consequence, it may be that he has yet more to teach me, that I may not understand it well, and that he may win me over to his point of view entirely. We have opportunities to pursue that over the coming weeks and I look forward to them.